In this paper we present an architecture for autonomous manipulation. Our approach is based on the belief that contact interactions during manipulation should be exploited to improve dexterity and that optimizing motion plans is useful to create more robust and repeatable manipulation behaviors. We therefore propose an architecture where state of the art force/torque control and optimization-based motion planning are the core components of the system. We give a detailed description of the modules that constitute the complete system and discuss the challenges inherent to creating such a system. We present experimental results for several grasping and manipulation tasks to demonstrate the performance and robustness of our approach.

Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 281(1783):1-7, May 2014 (article)

Abstract

A large number of recent studies suggest that the sensorimotor system uses probabilistic models to predict its environment and makes inferences about unobserved variables in line with Bayesian statistics. One of the important features of Bayesian statistics is Occam's Razor—an inbuilt preference for simpler models when comparing competing models that explain some observed data equally well. Here, we test directly for Occam's Razor in sensorimotor control. We designed a sensorimotor task in which participants had to draw lines through clouds of noisy samples of an unobserved curve generated by one of two possible probabilistic models—a simple model with a large length scale, leading to smooth curves, and a complex model with a short length scale, leading to more wiggly curves. In training trials, participants were informed about the model that generated the stimulus so that they could learn the statistics of each model. In probe trials, participants were then exposed to ambiguous stimuli. In probe trials where the ambiguous stimulus could be fitted equally well by both models, we found that participants showed a clear preference for the simpler model. Moreover, we found that participants’ choice behaviour was quantitatively consistent with Bayesian Occam's Razor. We also show that participants’ drawn trajectories were similar to samples from the Bayesian predictive distribution over trajectories and significantly different from two non-probabilistic heuristics. In two control experiments, we show that the preference of the simpler model cannot be simply explained by a difference in physical effort or by a preference for curve smoothness. Our results suggest that Occam's Razor is a general behavioural principle already present during sensorimotor processing.

Purpose Sampling an action according to the probability that the action is believed to be the optimal one is sometimes called Thompson sampling. Methods Although mostly applied to bandit problems, Thompson sampling can also be used to solve sequential adaptive control problems, when the optimal policy is known for each possible environment. The predictive distribution over actions can then be constructed by a Bayesian superposition of the policies weighted by their posterior probability of being optimal. Results Here we discuss two important features of this approach. First, we show in how far such generalized Thompson sampling can be regarded as an optimal strategy under limited information processing capabilities that constrain the sampling complexity of the decision-making process. Second, we show how such Thompson sampling can be extended to solve causal inference problems when interacting with an environment in a sequential fashion. Conclusion In summary, our results suggest that Thompson sampling might not merely be a useful heuristic, but a principled method to address problems of adaptive sequential decision-making and causal inference.

The ability to grasp unknown objects still remains an unsolved problem in the robotics community. One of the challenges is to choose an appropriate grasp configuration, i.e., the 6D pose of the hand relative to the object and its finger configuration. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm that is based on the assumption that similarly shaped objects can be grasped in a similar way. It is able to synthesize good grasp poses for unknown objects by finding the best matching object shape templates associated with previously demonstrated grasps. The grasp selection algorithm is able to improve over time by using the information of previous grasp attempts to adapt the ranking of the templates to new situations. We tested our approach on two different platforms, the Willow Garage PR2 and the Barrett WAM robot, which have very different hand kinematics. Furthermore, we compared our algorithm with other grasp planners and demonstrated its superior performance. The results presented in this paper show that the algorithm is able to find good grasp configurations for a large set of unknown objects from a relatively small set of demonstrations, and does improve its performance over time.

The accuracy of optical flow estimation algorithms has been improving steadily as evidenced by results on the Middlebury optical flow benchmark. The typical formulation, however, has changed little since the work of Horn and Schunck. We attempt to uncover what has made recent advances possible through a thorough analysis of how the objective function, the optimization method, and modern implementation practices influence accuracy. We discover that "classical'' flow formulations perform surprisingly well when combined with modern optimization and implementation techniques. One key implementation detail is the median filtering of intermediate flow fields during optimization. While this improves the robustness of classical methods it actually leads to higher energy solutions, meaning that these methods are not optimizing the original objective function. To understand the principles behind this phenomenon, we derive a new objective function that formalizes the median filtering heuristic. This objective function includes a non-local smoothness term that robustly integrates flow estimates over large spatial neighborhoods. By modifying this new term to include information about flow and image boundaries we develop a method that can better preserve motion details. To take advantage of the trend towards video in wide-screen format, we further introduce an asymmetric pyramid downsampling scheme that enables the estimation of longer range horizontal motions. The methods are evaluated on Middlebury, MPI Sintel, and KITTI datasets using the same parameter settings.

Complexity is a hallmark of intelligent behavior consisting both of regular patterns and random variation. To quantitatively assess the complexity and randomness of human motion, we designed a motor task in which we translated subjects' motion trajectories into strings of symbol sequences. In the first part of the experiment participants were asked to perform self-paced movements to create repetitive patterns, copy pre-specified letter sequences, and generate random movements. To investigate whether the degree of randomness can be manipulated, in the second part of the experiment participants were asked to perform unpredictable movements in the context of a pursuit game, where they received feedback from an online Bayesian predictor guessing their next move. We analyzed symbol sequences representing subjects' motion trajectories with five common complexity measures: predictability, compressibility, approximate entropy, Lempel-Ziv complexity, as well as effective measure complexity. We found that subjects’ self-created patterns were the most complex, followed by drawing movements of letters and self-paced random motion. We also found that participants could change the randomness of their behavior depending on context and feedback. Our results suggest that humans can adjust both complexity and regularity in different movement types and contexts and that this can be assessed with information-theoretic measures of the symbolic sequences generated from movement trajectories.

2005

We introduce two new functionals, the constrained covariance and the kernel mutual information, to measure the degree of independence of random variables. These quantities are both based on the covariance between functions of the random variables in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs). We prove that when the RKHSs are universal, both functionals are zero if and only if the random variables are pairwise independent.
We also show that the kernel mutual information is an upper bound near independence on the Parzen window estimate of the mutual information.
Analogous results apply for two correlation-based dependence functionals introduced earlier: we show the kernel canonical correlation and the kernel generalised variance to be independence measures for universal
kernels, and prove the latter to be an upper bound on the mutual information near independence. The performance of the kernel dependence functionals in measuring independence is verified in the context of independent component analysis.

We provide a new unifying view, including all existing proper probabilistic
sparse approximations for Gaussian process regression. Our approach relies on
expressing the effective prior which the methods are using. This
allows new insights to be gained, and highlights the relationship between
existing methods. It also allows for a clear theoretically justified ranking
of the closeness of the known approximations to the corresponding full GPs.
Finally we point directly to designs of new better sparse approximations,
combining the best of the existing strategies, within attractive
computational constraints.

Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 71(3):333-359, October 2005 (article)

Abstract

In order to apply the maximum margin method in arbitrary metric
spaces, we suggest to embed the metric space into a Banach or
Hilbert space and to perform linear classification in this space.
We propose several embeddings and recall that an isometric embedding
in a Banach space is always possible while an isometric embedding in
a Hilbert space is only possible for certain metric spaces. As a
result, we obtain a general maximum margin classification
algorithm for arbitrary metric spaces (whose solution is
approximated by an algorithm of Graepel.
Interestingly enough, the embedding approach, when applied to a metric
which can be embedded into a Hilbert space, yields the SVM
algorithm, which emphasizes the fact that its solution depends on
the metric and not on the kernel. Furthermore we give upper bounds
of the capacity of the function classes corresponding to both
embeddings in terms of Rademacher averages. Finally we compare the
capacities of these function classes directly.

Gaussian process priors can be used to define flexible, probabilistic classification models. Unfortunately exact Bayesian inference is analytically intractable and various approximation techniques have been proposed. In this work we review and compare Laplace‘s method and Expectation Propagation for approximate Bayesian inference in the binary Gaussian process classification model. We present a comprehensive comparison of the approximations, their predictive performance and marginal likelihood estimates to results obtained by MCMC sampling. We explain theoretically and corroborate empirically the advantages of Expectation Propagation compared to Laplace‘s method.

Several large scale data mining applications, such as text categorization and gene expression analysis, involve high-dimensional data that is also inherently directional in nature. Often such data is L2 normalized so that it lies on the surface of a unit hypersphere. Popular models such as (mixtures of) multi-variate Gaussians are inadequate for characterizing such data. This paper proposes a generative mixture-model approach to clustering directional data based on the von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution, which arises naturally for data distributed on the unit hypersphere. In particular, we derive and analyze two variants of the Expectation Maximization (EM) framework for estimating the mean and concentration parameters of this mixture. Numerical estimation of the concentration parameters is non-trivial in high dimensions since it involves functional inversion of ratios of Bessel functions. We also formulate two clustering algorithms corresponding to the variants of EM that we derive. Our approach provides a
theoretical basis for the use of cosine similarity that has been widely employed by the information retrieval community, and obtains the spherical kmeans algorithm (kmeans with cosine similarity) as a special case of both variants. Empirical results on clustering of high-dimensional text and gene-expression data based on a mixture of vMF distributions show that the ability to estimate the concentration parameter for each vMF component, which is not present in existing approaches, yields superior results, especially for difficult clustering tasks in high-dimensional spaces.

We propose statistical learning methods for approximating implicit surfaces and computing dense 3D deformation fields. Our approach is based on Support Vector (SV) Machines, which are state of the art in machine learning. It is straightforward to implement and computationally competitive; its parameters can be automatically set using standard machine learning methods.
The surface approximation is based on a modified Support Vector regression. We present applications to 3D head reconstruction, including automatic removal of outliers and hole filling.
In a second step, we build on our SV representation to compute dense 3D deformation fields between two objects.
The fields are computed using a generalized SVMachine enforcing correspondence between the previously learned implicit SV object representations, as well as correspondences between feature points if such points are available.
We apply the method to the morphing of 3D heads and other objects.

Support vector machines (SVM) have been successfully used to classify proteins into functional categories.
Recently, to integrate multiple data sources, a semidefinite programming (SDP) based SVM method was introduced Lanckriet et al (2004). In SDP/SVM, multiple kernel matrices corresponding to each of data sources are combined with
weights obtained by solving an SDP. However, when trying to apply SDP/SVM to large problems, the computational cost can become prohibitive, since both converting the data to a kernel matrix for the SVM and solving the SDP are time and memory demanding. Another application-specific drawback arises when some of the data sources are protein networks. A common method of converting the network to a kernel matrix is the diffusion kernel method, which has
time complexity of O(n^3), and produces a dense matrix of size n x n. We propose an efficient method of protein classification using multiple protein networks. Available protein networks, such as a physical interaction network or a
metabolic network, can be directly incorporated. Vectorial data can also be incorporated after conversion into a network by means of neighbor point connection. Similarly to the SDP/SVM method, the combination weights are obtained by convex optimization. Due to the sparsity of network edges, the computation time is nearly linear in the number of edges
of the combined network. Additionally, the combination weights provide information useful for discarding noisy or irrelevant networks. Experiments on function prediction of 3588 yeast proteins show promising results: the computation time is enormously reduced, while the accuracy is still comparable to the SDP/SVM method.

In recent years, Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) has been suggested for various image processing tasks requiring an image model such as, e.g., denoising or compression. The original form of KPCA, however, can be only applied to strongly restricted image classes due to the limited number of training examples that can be processed. We therefore propose a new iterative method for performing KPCA, the Kernel Hebbian Algorithm which iteratively estimates the Kernel Principal Components with only linear order memory complexity. In our experiments, we compute models for complex image classes such as faces and natural images which require a large number of training examples. The resulting image models are tested in single-frame super-resolution and denoising applications. The KPCA model is not specifically tailored to these tasks; in fact, the same model can be used in super-resolution with variable input resolution, or denoising with unknown noise characteristics. In spite of this, both super-resolution a
nd denoising performance are comparable to existing methods.

Gene expression profiling of three chondrosarcoma derived cell lines (AD, SM, 105KC) showed an increased proliferative activity and a reduced expression of chondrocytic-typical matrix products compared to primary chondrocytes. The incapability to maintain an adequate matrix synthesis as well as a notable proliferative activity at the same time is comparable to neoplastic chondrosarcoma cells in vivo which cease largely cartilage matrix formation as soon as their proliferative activity increases. Thus, the investigated cell lines are of limited value as substitute of primary chondrocytes but might have a much higher potential to investigate the behavior of neoplastic chondrocytes, i.e. chondrosarcoma biology.

We propose new bounds on the error of learning algorithms in terms of a data-dependent notion of complexity. The estimates we establish give optimal rates and are based on a local and empirical version of Rademacher averages, in the sense that the Rademacher averages are computed from the data, on a subset of functions with small empirical error. We present some applications to classification and prediction with convex function classes, and with kernel classes in particular.

This paper addresses the problem of choosing a kernel suitable for
estimation with a Support Vector
Machine, hence further automating machine learning.
This goal is achieved by defining a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert
Space on the space of kernels itself. Such a formulation leads to a
statistical estimation problem similar to the problem of minimizing
a regularized risk functional.
We state the equivalent
representer theorem for the choice of kernels and present a
semidefinite programming formulation of the resulting optimization
problem. Several recipes for constructing hyperkernels are provided, as
well as the details of common machine learning problems. Experimental
results for classification, regression and novelty
detection on UCI data show the feasibility of our approach.

One way of image denoising is to project a noisy image to the subspace of admissible images derived, for instance, by PCA. However, a major drawback of this method is that all pixels are updated by the projection, even when only a few pixels are corrupted by noise or occlusion. We propose a new method to identify the noisy pixels by l1-norm penalization and to update the identified pixels only. The identification and updating of noisy pixels are formulated as one linear program which can be efficiently solved. In particular, one can apply the upsilon trick to directly specify the fraction of pixels to be reconstructed. Moreover, we extend the linear program to be able to exploit prior knowledge that occlusions often appear in contiguous blocks (e.g., sunglasses on faces). The basic idea is to penalize boundary points and interior points of the occluded area differently. We are also able to show the upsilon property for this extended LP leading to a method which is easy to use. Experimental results demonstrate the power of our approach.

We address the problem of learning a symmetric positive definite matrix. The central issue is to design
parameter updates that preserve positive definiteness. Our updates are motivated with the von
Neumann divergence. Rather than treating the most general case, we focus on two key applications
that exemplify our methods: on-line learning with a simple square loss, and finding a symmetric
positive definite matrix subject to linear constraints. The updates generalize the exponentiated gradient
(EG) update and AdaBoost, respectively: the parameter is now a symmetric positive definite
matrix of trace one instead of a probability vector (which in this context is a diagonal positive definite
matrix with trace one). The generalized updates use matrix logarithms and exponentials to
preserve positive definiteness. Most importantly, we show how the derivation and the analyses of
the original EG update and AdaBoost generalize to the non-diagonal case. We apply the resulting
matrix exponentiated gradient (MEG) update and DefiniteBoost to the problem of learning a kernel
matrix from distance measurements.

Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 22(5):801-809, May 2005 (article)

Abstract

A number of models of depth cue combination suggest that the final depth percept results from a weighted average of independent depth estimates based on the different cues available. The weight of each cue in such an average is thought to depend on the reliability of each cue. In principle, such a depth estimation could be statistically optimal in the sense of producing the minimum variance unbiased estimator that can be constructed from the available information. Here we test such models using visual and haptic depth information. Different texture types produce differences in slant discrimination performance, providing a means for testing a reliability-sensitive cue combination model using texture as one of the cues to slant. Our results show that the weights for the cues were generally sensitive to their reliability, but fell short of statistically optimal combinationwe find reliability-based re-weighting, but not statistically optimal cue combination.

In psychophysical studies, the psychometric function is used to model the relation between physical stimulus intensity and the observers ability to detect or discriminate between stimuli of different intensities. In this study, we propose the use of Bayesian inference to extract the information contained in experimental data to estimate the parameters of psychometric functions. Because Bayesian inference cannot be performed analytically, we describe how a Markov chain Monte Carlo method can be used to generate samples from the posterior distribution over parameters. These samples are used to estimate Bayesian confidence intervals and other characteristics of the posterior distribution. In addition, we discuss the parameterization of psychometric functions and the role of prior distributions in the analysis. The proposed approach is exemplified using artificially generated data and in a case study for real experimental data. Furthermore, we compare our approach with traditional methods based on maximum likelihood parameter estimation combined with bootstrap techniques for confidence interval estimation and find the Bayesian approach to be superior.

Regulatory regions of plant genes tend to be more compact than those of animal genes, but the complement of transcription factors encoded in plant genomes is as large or larger than that found in those of animals. Plants therefore provide an opportunity to study how transcriptional programs control multicellular development. We analyzed global gene expression during development of the reference plant Arabidopsis thaliana in samples covering many stages, from embryogenesis to senescence, and diverse organs. Here, we provide a first analysis of this data set, which is part of the AtGenExpress expression atlas. We observed that the expression levels of transcription factor genes and signal transduction components are similar to those of metabolic genes. Examining the expression patterns of large gene families, we found that they are often more similar than would be expected by chance, indicating that many gene families have been co-opted for specific developmental processes.

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems